It’s getting harder to pick out indie titles for the first of the fifty and I’m sure I’ve skipped one or two already. I managed to dig one out from the pile though, multiplayer focused strategy game Naked War. I believe it’s vaguely Worms inspired, but we’ll see where that goes.

Our Thoughts

One of the downsides of playing this game on my own is that it’s simply not a single player game. Most would implement simple bots that at least give you somewhat of a challenge, but in this case the opposing soldiers just stand around doing nothing. It made the game easy, of course, and I could explore what the game did in different places, but surely it’d be worth a day or two to add anything? (Yeah, I know feature development in games is never that easy. I also know how these trade offs work and how it could be made to work)

I mean, there were still parts that were made difficult, but that’s the controls or rules. With explosions reducing height, units can get into a place where you cannot find a place to fire at them. In other places, because the heights are difficult to deal with (it’s hard to target when paths cross over each other) some are easily sheltered without a way to reach them. I don’t know whether I’m missing something in the controls, whether that fixes itself in real multiplayer or whether you’d just be out of luck.

So I can see the appeal, you could run around and shoot each while avoiding your enemies (there are steps for that). Everyone has high HP – you can take a punch, there’s no insta-kills or other tricks that I’ve seen. That will add some longevity to the game and leads you to allowing for more tactical setups than you need otherwise.

While the game has cartoony-ish graphics, the weapons and machines feel quite militaristic. In a way that makes it feel weirder that there is no death, but instead that the characters lose their clothes, cartoon style. It makes it a cartoonish setup that I feel doesn’t come across elsewhere, which makes it feel odd. There’s ways to regain your clothes, apparently, as a way to control the ebb and flow of the battle, but without a single player mode, it’s hard to tell any of this.

Final Thoughts

Naked War is clearly set up for multiplayer, playing on your own maps and trying to figure out how to defeat your opponent. Single player doesn’t work, and it feels like a big omission that would have made this accessible – if only to get more practice. It would have made it engaging for me – just not now.